Halsall saw off threat of Australian sisters Cate and Bronte Campbell to land
second Commonwealth success this year and ninth overall

The Tollcross pool was as sultry and steamy as a Turkish bath last night, as Francesca Halsall and Adam Peaty swept to victory on a surge of English passions rarely glimpsed here in the East End of Glasgow.

For a home crop of swimmers starved of glory at the London Olympics, this felt like the belated Commonwealths equivalent of ‘Super Saturday’. There had barely been time to digest Halsall’s quite remarkable swim to win the 50 metres freestyle, swatting aside the formidable challenge of Australian sisters Cate and Bronte Campbell, before 19-year-old Peaty brought out the red-and-white bunting once more by vanquishing South African favourite Cameron van der Burgh in the 100m breaststroke in a stunning upset.

On paper they could not have looked more different: Halsall, a relative veteran at 24 but rejuvenated by her luminous displays in Glasgow, and Peaty, the Uttoxeter teenager who shredded the form guide with the fastest time ever by a British man in his event, for a gold medal that reduced his mentor Rebecca Adlington to copious, mascara-smearing tears.

Given that Halsall also set her second Commonwealth record time in the space of an hour to reach the 50m butterfly final, there could be another triumph by the Merseyside mermaid to toast tonight.

Halsall is fond of describing herself as “10 per cent rock star”, but the ebullient blonde might now like to increase that fraction a touch. In dispatching the Campbell siblings, she sealed her second Commonwealth gold and ninth overall, thus balming the wounds of London two years ago, when she could manage only fifth in the 50m free. None of her wins, however, have been accomplished with such élan as this.

Crucially, she screened out the distractions of the rangy Cate, a swimmer almost half a foot taller, in a wonderfully fluid performance that yielded a time of 23.96 seconds, only 0.23sec shy of the world record set by Germany’s Britta Steffen in Rome in 2009.

There was a striking calm about Halsall here, as if her nightmares at major meetings over the past four years had been fully and decisively purged. The less said about her previous Commonwealths, in Delhi in 2010, the better, considering that she spent most of her time in Delhi suffering with food poisoning so acute that, in her recollections, embers of the England coaching team were questioning whether she would survive.

It is testament to her tenacity, though, that even in such a condition she still managed to amass five medals.

The stark difference in 2014 can be ascribed in part to the efforts of her coach, James Gibson, a former world champion himself, who has plainly reinforced the confidence of his 24-year-old charge.

“So many thanks go to him, bumping up my weights and making sure I’m strong,” she said. “But it’s not just what he does – it’s the way he talks to me.”

Halsall has also been working with associates of Dr Steve Peters, the mind coach, to refine her psychological approach to these occasions, and the results last night were self-evident.

“It helps me to get in the right place,” she said. “I’m not a person who shies away from a race but I can get overexcited and overtired, so it’s about reeling me in and making sure that I get the balance right, that I am ready to race fast after a difficult Olympics. The last couple of years have been very challenging for me. Going into the world championships last summer, I was very mentally fatigued. This is the first time I have felt fully prepared heading into a competition. I was conscious that I was swimming well, so I wanted it to let it out, to have the opportunity to show it. It was a case of nerves and adrenalin mixed into one.”

The anxieties were largely over whether she would do herself justice, having reached the final as the fastest qualifier. “I felt sick beforehand, because I knew it was going well and that I had more in the tank,” she admitted. “It was a bit chaotic in the build-up, but I just had to remember what I needed to do, to disengage from the hype.”

Only when she stood atop the medal rostrum, with the Campbells gamely mouthing the verses of Jerusalem, did the emotion begin to register. “Their singing did me chuckle. It all feels like a fairytale.”

Halsall can be a zany soul, often interspersing her thoughts on swimming with meditations on religious philosophy, a product of her long-standing preoccupation with theology. But last night there was nothing but tunnel vision.

She explained: “I was going in as favourite with Bronte and Cate, and the final was so fast. There hasn’t been a final that fast in a long time, but somehow I didn’t feel a lot of pressure. I knew what I wanted to do and what my race-plan was, so I just stuck to it and trusted that I would be thereabouts at the end. It seemed to work.”

Something of an understatement, perhaps, as she emerged with the fastest time in the world this year. Extraordinarily, there was more to come from the Merseyside mermaid, as she then streaked to victory in her semi-final in the 50 metres butterfly with a Games record of 25.36sec, over half a second clear of Arianna Vanderpool Wallace from the Bahamas.

“Two personal times in one evening – you can’t ask for much more than that,” she reflected. “This is an evening that is going to stay with me for a very long time.”

The same was true of Peaty, who had been fourth behind Scottish poster-boy Ross Murdoch in the 200m breaststroke but announced his immense talent with gold in the 100m. The fact that he beat Van der Burgh, the Olympic champion and world-record holder, in the process was almost too much for him to compute.

“I can’t believe it, it’s a dream,” he said. “I’ve studied Cameron for a while– he was my idol, and now he’s my rival. I knew I would go off quickly, but I caught him. It is a major stepping-stone for me, and for swimming in the country.”

The evening was complete when Molly Renshaw, the 18 year-old from Derbyshire, produced a superb final length to seize a bronze in the final of the 200 metres breaststroke behind the Australian duo of Taylor McKeown and Sally Hunter, while relegating Scotland’s Hannah Miley to fourth.

How the Glaswegians cursed. And yet even they had to concede, amid the fluttering of St George’s flags, that this was a night that belonged to the Sassenachs.